Episode 92
Hair loss is estimated to affect 80 million Americans. The conventional one size fits all approach fails to address the root causes of hair loss. Many have tried this approach with minimal to no results. We at Nimbus healthcare use personalized medicine to address hair loss’s root cause or causes. By checking genetics and providing lifestyle medicine, each solution is unique. This episode will discuss the structure and function of hair, why the conventional approach fails, and how Nimbus achieves unparalleled success in restoring normal, healthy hair.
Lifestyle Medicine with Dr. Harris
Episode Transcript
Dr. Richard Harris 00:00
Hello and welcome to the strive for great health podcast with your host, Dr. Richard Harris, a podcast where we empower you to take control of your health with lifestyle medicine in the health mindset to live with purpose and joy. And today, we’re going to be talking about something that’s near and dear to my heart because it is what we do at Nimbus healthcare, our flagship product, and that is hair loss. We’re gonna be talking about what hair is; we’re going to dive into the root causes of hair loss. And then finally, we’re going to end on why Nimbus is such a unique and truly customized solution. Why there’s nothing else like it on the market, and how we’re helping so many people regrow their hair. Are you ready to boost your health, EQ, and IQ? Cue the music!
Dr. Richard Harris 00:56
Join me Dr. Richard Harris as we strive to unlock the secret to the human body. Strive for Wellness strive for great health. Follow the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google, and Android.
Dr. Richard Harris 01:22
Real quick before we get started, the strive for health podcast is a lifestyle wellness and mindset podcast. But we can’t put everything about health, wellness, and mindset into the podcast. There’s just not enough time. It’s such a complex subject. That’s why we created our lifestyle medicine and health mindset, and wellness courses. Now you may be asking Are these courses right for me, if you’re someone who wants to increase their health span longevity, how long we live without chronic disease, if you’re someone who’s been told you have risk factors if you’re someone that’s been told, there are some things that you need to watch out for some things you need to change. Otherwise, you’re heading down a road that leads to disease. Or if you’re someone who has a chronic ailment, and you’re wanting a more holistic approach to fix yourself to heal yourself, then the wellness courses are for you.
Dr. Richard Harris 02:20
If you’re not willing to invest in your health, if you’re not someone who is willing to do things in a sustainable manner, if you’re someone who’s looking for a quick fix, then the courses are not for you. The courses are designed to teach you everything that I have learned through reading hundreds of studies, hours of clinical practice, years of devotion to this lifestyle, medicine and the health mindset so you can live a life full of joy and purpose. If that sounds good to you, head to theghwellness.com and click courses at the top. Now to this week’s episode.
Dr. Richard Harris 02:57
Hello, and welcome to strive for great health podcast. And we’re gonna start off with a few housekeeping things. Number one, and actually the only housekeeping item is that going forward, the releases are not going to be so scheduled. When we went on hiatus, we were releasing every two weeks on Wednesdays. And really during that time period, I did a lot of soul searching. And I realized the podcast was starting to feel more like a job. And I had to get back to why did I start podcasting in the first place? And the answer to that question is I just really wanted to be a source of science based information to help you guys understand the science, get to the mindset of health, and really be able to share a story of hope of joy of peace of love of Jesus Christ and wellness. And in order to do that, I can’t have this feel like a job. We don’t directly monetize the podcast, we ask that you donate to your favorite charity if you want to support the podcast, of course, we have our estore and our courses and we mentioned those but selling those from the podcast is not the major goal of the podcast. It is really to give information. So I said that to say this release is going forward are going to be whenever an episode is done. Whenever I get my creative juices going, we get in the flow, we get everything done.
Dr. Richard Harris 04:22
I’m not going to give myself deadlines. And I think this is going to be better for the show because it’s going to allow me to be more creative, more free, and not have this feels like it’s a job. Hopefully we’ll get at least two episodes a month. That’s still kind of sort of a goal. But when they happen, it might be to one one week and that’s it for the month. So we’re gonna see going forward what it’s like but of course, if you’re subscribed, you’ll know when the episodes are dropping. If you follow me on social media, you’ll know. And if you subscribe to our mailing list, you’ll know but let’s dive in hair loss.
Dr. Richard Harris 04:53
This is one of the most common complaints that we see, especially for men. Typically, we think of women being the ones who are more cosmetic hair loss is not an uncommon problem. Alopecia Areata can affect point 2% of people, that’s the autoimmune version androgenic alopecia can affect up to 50% of men and 15% of women. So these are millions of people that this can affect the data shows that hair loss is associated with a decrease in confidence, decrease in our rating of our own sexual attractiveness, a decrease in our mental well being in our feelings for ourselves. So this is actually a big deal. This is a bigger deal than just Oh, it’s just hair. This can affect our mental health. And like we’ve talked about so much on the podcast before, mental health can be a sign of physical health and like we’ve talked about, and the skin podcast, what happens to your skin can be a microcosm for what’s happening in your system.
Dr. Richard Harris 06:01
Okay, let’s dive in. What is hair, we have hair follicles over most of the parts of our body except our lips palmed in the bottom of the feet, and then parts of the genitals. We have approximately 5 million hair follicles on our body, and only about 100,000 of them are on the scalp. So most of the hair on our bodies are not on the scalp. What are the functions of hair, it’s an environmental protection. It literally helps the skin serve as a barrier to prevent entry of toxins and chemicals. It helps with thermo regulation temperature control. In fact, when your hair stands up on edge, and we call that pilot erection, that’s one of the things that happens as a way of regulating our body’s own temperature. That helps to facilitate the removal of dirt and dead skin cells. We know that it has a very prominent social and sexual attraction function.
Dr. Richard Harris 06:54
If it didn’t, you wouldn’t see all these commercials and millions of dollars spent on haircare products. It is a big part of our own self image our hair and it also has UV protection so it helps protect us from overexposure to UV light. Let’s talk about hair structure. This consists of two parts there’s the follicle which is the part living under the skin and then the hair shaft itself. And then close conjunction are the erector Pillai muscles. We talked about that that’s what makes the hair stand up. There your sebaceous glands we covered sebaceous glands in the acne podcast, and these help secrete sebum was helped moisturize hair and skin, their sweat glands and other Apricorn glands like pheromones that are in close conjunction to our hair structures. The hair shaft is composed mainly of keratin about 95% keratin. Keratin is a fibrous helix shaped protein. It’s also a part of skin and nails. Keratin is made by special cells called keratinocytes. Keratin is insoluble in water. And this is what makes hair impermeable and offers protection. It really gives hair its structure and its strength. Hair is composed of 18 different amino acids, and that includes cysteine, proline, alanine, glycine, arginine, and sarine. And there’s three distinct parts to the hair shaft. There’s the medulla, this is the innermost layer, it contains an oily, soft substance really, for internal coding.
Dr. Richard Harris 08:29
There’s the cuticle, which is a thin, protective outer layer. And this contains nutrients necessary for hair growth. And it’s composed of keratinocytes as well, that things that make the keratin. Then there’s the cortex. This is the main component of the hair shaft. It has long keratin chains for elasticity, it contains a high amount of proteins and fats. And the cortex also contains melanocytes and we’ve talked about melanocytes before. These are the cells that make melanin. And so this is what’s responsible for hair color. Let’s talk the hair follicle. That’s the other part is the growth structure. It’s where we renew our hair and the cells move up to the hair shaft. It’s composed of two parts. There’s an upper part of the follicle and a lower part. Some people will say the follicle is a living part of the hair. Because the hair shaft is containing dead cells, it’s not alive cells. The upper is the infundibulum and the isthmus the lower part and has the hair bulb and the suprabulbar region.
Dr. Richard Harris 09:36
The upper part remains constant. While the lower part has continuous cycles of regeneration. This is where the hair stem cells are. The upper part is funnel shaped structure filled with sebum from the sebaceous glands. And the hair follicle stem cells are thought to reside in the isthmus and then they move down into the follicle into the bulb and then move upwards afterwards. that they have really slow life cycles, the hair follicle stem cells. And this is thought to preserve proliferative function. And to minimize DNA errors. We’ve talked about this on the podcast before that as our cells replicate, they can create errors. And this can lead to abnormal function, cancer, inflammation, all of that. So they have slow cycles, meaning slow regenerative cycles. To help prevent this, the stem cells migrate down into the hair bold matrix, and then differentiate into the cells that form the hair shaft and the inner hair sheath. They also move distally to form sebaceous glands, and we’ll move to help the skin cells wound healing. Our hair also will help grow the surrounding structures that we mentioned earlier, and then also will help if we develop a wound. The suprabulbar region is where the hair cells begin to keratinized and it’s composed of three regions the outer root sheath, the inner root sheath and the hair shaft. The outer root sheath also contains melanocytes, which we just talked about help deal with skin pigmentation and hair color. It contains Langerhans cells. Langerhans cells are similar to macrophages. We talked about macrophages in the immune system podcast, these function for immune surveillance in the skin. And then there are things called Merkel cells. And Merkel cells are thought to be involved with light touch, and hormone signaling. They’re part of what we call our neuroendocrine system, neuro meaning nerves brain. Endocrine meaning hormone. These are thought to do with light touch mainly in some signaling functions.
Dr. Richard Harris 11:38
The hair bulb is the active reproductive part of the follicle. It has two parts the matrix and the papilla. Matrix cells produce keratins associated proteins, they also contain melanocytes, the papilla is responsible for determining the follicle type. It contains growth factors for the hair, overall, the volume and secretory activity of the papilla. And the number of matrix cells determine the size of the engine hair bulb, we’ll talk about what anagen means here in a minute, how long it stays in that phase, and the diameter of the hair shaft. And this is why you tend to see with different ethnicities, there are different types of hair, the hair follicles, also supported by network of nerves and blood vessels. And flow increases during the growth phase to support hair growth. You can see this is a very complex ecosystem that there’s a lot that’s needed. You need proteins, you need fats, you need building blocks, you need blood flow, you need nerves to tell the state of the body and then you need cells to actually build it looks like building a city. There’s a lot that goes on, you need water supply, you need raw materials, you need overseers to help guide people and you need the workers to actually build things very similar to that.
Dr. Richard Harris 12:55
Now we talked about anagen just now. Now, what about hair growth cycles. This is what anagen means there’s also two other parts of the hair growth cycle called catagen and telogen. These are the three phases of hair growth. There’s the anagen which is the growth phase catagen which is regression to gin which is rest and then after telogen the hair shaft will fall out. Basically during the catagen the bulb goes dormant. And the hair follicle fully keratinized is this has been shed during the telogen. In one grow signals happen the hair has the anagen phase again, and it’s also called Exogen when the hair shed. Now normally hair will spend about 85 to 90% of its lifecycle in the anagen phase, about 1% catagen and then 10 to 15% telogen. Typically that anagen phase lasts about two to six years from we talked about these are really slow growth and proliferative cycles normally. Catagen two to three weeks, telogen three months. On average, what is normal is losing about 100 to 200 hairs per day. That’s what’s normal. And this can be sped up or slowed down by certain things. And that’s what we’re going to talk about what are the root causes of hair loss? There are three main types of hair loss. There’s alopecia areata, which is an auto immune disease, there’s telogen effluvium, which is hair loss caused by stress.
Dr. Richard Harris 14:24
We’re seeing a lot of that with COVID. There are case reports coming out more and more that COVID is causing this type of hair loss and this can be the most dramatic because your hair just falls out in clumps. And then there’s androgenic alopecia or male pattern baldness. This is typically what we think about when we think about hair loss, right male pattern baldness, and that’s where you get the literal male pattern baldness where you have the crown of the head and then in a circular pattern, and that’s caused by excess DHT or dihydrotestosterone. We’ll talk about that more in a minute. Alopecia areata is circular or oval, like hair loss typically happens out of the blue. And this is due to an autoimmune condition. And then like we mentioned telogen effluvium, the hair falls out in clumps, and many hairs enter the arrest phase, the Catagen phase all at once. And this is typically due to stress medications, hormones, and proper nutrition toxins. Now, let’s relate our root causes of chronic disease to what happens with hair loss, because all of the root causes can cause hair loss. And this is one of the things that makes Nimbus unique.
Dr. Richard Harris 15:36
When you sign up for a Nimbus, everyone gets my five pillar information, you get information about nutrition, sleep, about moderating stress, and exercise, and avoiding toxins, all the things that are very, very important lifestyle medicine, to keeping us healthy to get access to that. But how do these things cause hair loss, inflammation, inflammation can cause an increase in inflammatory mediators like TNF alpha, we’ve talked about TNF alpha before IL-1, which will induce Catagen phase in cause death of the hair follicle. Anytime there’s what we call program cell death that’s called apoptosis, where a cell literally sends a suicide signal and says, You know what I’m out. And this can be good sometimes if it’s part of a normal life cycle. But it can be bad if it’s induced prematurely, inflammation can cause this. And then sustained inflammation can lead to fibrosis deposits around the hair follicle. This is bad, because now you’ve changed the literal structure around the hair follicle. And structure determines function.
Dr. Richard Harris 16:49
We have fibrosis around the hair follicle and inflammation. Now, that tissue is hard and stiff, we’re not going to be able to function properly, toxins. Excess UV light can trigger inflammation leading to cycle arrest, apoptosis and injury of stem cells. Then we have things like heavy metals, thallium, mercury, they’ve been known to disrupt hair, excess selenium and vitamin A in medications like culture gene, and of course, the most well known is chemotherapy. How does chemotherapy cause hair loss? Well, because what chemotherapy does, it is attacks the cell cycle, it attacks cells, and it causes a rapid arrest of them. Basically, you send all your hair into the Catagen phase and your hair falls out. thallium disrupts keratin formation. thallium is found in soil in certain areas. It was an insecticide. So there are some areas of the country that have high thallium levels. It’s also in people who work in manufacturing or electronic semiconductors with alloys they can get exposed to toxic levels of thallium, mercury, we’ve talked about Mercury before it disrupts keratin, arsenic and other heavy metal mainly found in soil water, pesticides, animal feeds. And then Colchicine, Colchicine works by disrupting cell division we use cultures even for inflammatory conditions like gout. Sometimes myocarditis in while people are on the medication, it can cause hair loss. Endocrine disruptors, we’ve talked about indican disruptors here on the podcast before BPA, BPS PFAS, pthlates, dioxins. Go back and listen to the toxin podcast. And these things can all either disrupt certain hormones, or they can cause inflammation, or they can lead to insulin resistance, all of which is going to impair hair growth, stress.
Dr. Richard Harris 18:45
We’ve talked about how stress causes physiological changes. Sustained stress leads to inflammation or on the hair follicle through mediators like CRH, cortisol, substance P, and nerve growth factor, which induces the Catagen phase. So basically, we get super stressed. And then our body says, Hey, we’re stressed releases a bunch of stress mediators. And the hair follicle says, Nope, I’m not growing anymore. I’m going into arrest and then we also get an increase in local inflammation. Here’s really cool thing. Well, from a physiological perspective, not so cool. That’s happening to you, you get an increase in local inflammation. And this stress increases the susceptibility of the hair follicles. By increasing MHC’s we did not talk about MHC’s. I don’t think we talked about it and the immune podcast it makes these are the major histocompatibility complex is basically how our cells recognize each other. It’s how we recognize self and non self. And there are areas of the body that are immune to immune surveillance pun intended. Basically, these areas have less MHC’s on their cells. So the immune system doesn’t partition and attacking them doesn’t look for them doesn’t recognize them and your hair follicles when it has very little immune surveillance because of lack of these MHC’s.
Dr. Richard Harris 20:10
But what happens with inflammation is you up regulate these MH C’s. So now the hair follicles are susceptible to dysregulated inflammation CRH will also cause hair follicles to produce its own hormones, further worsening inflammation. It’s like a vicious cycle. And crhs corticotropin releasing hormone, it’s basically cortisol is grandfather, it’s released from the brain tells the adrenals to release cortisol. Well I skip this step, it goes to the pituitary tells the pituitary to release ACTH ACTH goes to adrenals to tell the adrenals to release cortisol. That HPA Axis podcast is coming I promise we’ll get into all that soon. moral story here, stress causes inflammation and that inflammation can lead to hair loss, nutrient deficiencies, iron deficiency can cause it because of abnormal blood flow.
Dr. Richard Harris 21:01
Again, we talked about how you need the river you need to bring nutrients in. And so if you can’t bring the right nutrients, the right proteins, the right fats, you can’t sustain hair growth biotin deficiency biotin deficiencies are actually super rare. Really, they’ve only been reported in people who were on continuous tube feeds. And that’s because we have our microbiome and our microbiome is capable of making all the biotin that we need. But in people who are biotin deficient, you get hair loss. Vitamin D deficiency, vitamin D regulates over 200 different genes. We had a whole podcast on vitamin D, but it’s also involved in follicle cycling. Zinc deficiency, zinc is involved in cell division protein synthesis. It’s involved in something called the hedgehog WNT or WNT signaling pathway. This is a major signal for anagen phase of your zinc deficient, you’re not going to get into the anagen phase as often and you’re going to have hair loss. protein malnutrition, especially for assisting low total antioxidant capacity. We talked about that in the metabolic podcast. The hair follicle is extremely susceptible to reactive oxygen species induced damage. If these terms aren’t familiar to you go listen to the metabolic podcast dysbiosis of the skin. Proprionobacteria may cause micro inflammation in the follicle that’s the main bacteria that in some people can cause acne, and this can also cause inflammation on the follicle and we just talked about why that’s a problem. hormone dysregulation mainly affects telogen phase as androgens, stress hormones, retinoids and thyroid hormones.
Dr. Richard Harris 22:46
These can all affect the telogen phase. Excess androgens cause an overproduction of transforming growth factor beta, and they signal growth arrest. This is why you see so much male pattern baldness, but we’re gonna get into that more in a minute. it impairs hair follicle stem cell differentiation, excess androgens, especially DHT Dihydrotestosterone impairs hair follicle stem cell differentiation and signals for the hair follicle to stop the growth phase two enter the Catagen phase genetics any changes in genes related to anything we have mentioned here can influence hair loss. And we’re going to go into this much more in a minute. Physical trauma to the scalp, or techniques that cause shearing stress to the hair like cornrows can cause hair loss, we talked about structure can dictate function. If you cause any type of physical damage to the structure, it’s going to impair the function. And we see this a lot with some of these techniques where the hair is pulled really tight. With hats wearing hats can cause hair loss because of mechanical shear and stress or if you get a blow to the head. Now, the conventional approach, the conventional approach, once again, uses a one size fits all. So the FDA approved is either finasteride or minoxidil. And we’re going to talk about what those do here in a minute. But this is a problem because if you look at the genes like we do at Nimbus, we can tell whether you’re going to respond to these therapies.
Dr. Richard Harris 24:20
If I put you on one therapy, and then these therapies may take up to six months to work, then you don’t have the genetics to respond to that I just wasted six months. How many times do I get with you to wait six months before you move on? Maybe twice? Max? This is why we are so excited about this approach because we’re using personalized medicine. If you’ve never been introduced to personalized medicine before personalized medicine is using your genetics and metabolic information to customize treatment options, and it combines medication, supplements and lifestyle medicine. In here Nimbus. We use topical medications combined with appropriate vitamins and nutrients, why topical because we want it to work at the hair follicle. That’s where all the action is. If I give you an oral pill you’ve got swallow would go through your stomach, go through your intestines, get in your bloodstream, and travel all the way through your blood to the hair follicle. If I have therapy that’s just as effective and the data shows that topical therapy is just as effective. Why not do that where I get it directly to the hair follicle and I minimize the risk of systemic side effects. One of the main problems with finasteride is it causes significant sexual side effects. We’ll talk about that more here in a minute. What do we do here at Nimbus. Well, you get a kit, you swab your cheek, we look at your genes, and we’re looking at genes related to many different aspects of hair growth. The first thing we look at is hair growth regulators. One of these is called prostaglandins. And prostaglandins are a family of hormone like molecules that have various functions in the body, including regulation of temperature, immune response, stomach acid, body temperature, and blood pressure. And we’re looking at mainly the prostaglandin, D2, F and E type. These are the ones that are linked here, we look at a gene called GPRR44.
Dr. Richard Harris 26:20
It’s one of the prostaglandin receptors. It’s mainly for D2. What happens here is, if you have an overactive version of this, it can favour inflammation and arrest of cell division. And what we can do is we can use a topical version of Zyrtec or Cetirizine to block this. If your GPRR44 gene is too active, we can use a topical Cetirizine to block that, and that’s going to regulate that anagen catagen and telogen phase, there’s another gene called the PTGFR. And this is a receptor for another prostaglandin. It mainly binds F2, but also D2, normal activity is associated with cell arrest. If the receptor is normal here, we can use an inhibitor like latanoprost. Latanoprost originally was a glaucoma medication. But when we look at what this is, hey, is this medication going to be effective, because data shows that latanoprost can be very effective for growing hair. But if your PTGFR gene shows that your receptor isn’t as active, then the latanoprost isn’t going to work. That’s what we look at with personalized medicine. We look at the gene and we look at okay, what’s the effect that this gene is having? In this case, we’re looking at basically what we call pharmacogenetics, looking at the effect of certain genes on medication, is that medication going to be more or less or having no effect.
Dr. Richard Harris 27:54
Another gene we look at is PGE synthase. It turns PGH2 into PGE2. PGE2 activation, lowers inflammation and improves blood flow is a good time to talk about these prostaglandins, some of them are pro-inflammatory, some of them are anti- inflammatory. We want to increase the anti-inflammatory ones decrease the pro-inflammatory ones minoxidil. This is how Rogaine or minoxidil works, it works by increasing PGE2. Now if you have less activity of the PGE synthase, then you’re going to need higher doses of minoxidil or we need to use another agent. This is why minoxidil may not work for people. Another reason is there’s a gene called SULT1A1. And this codes for an enzyme known as sulfurtransferase is these are enzymes that detoxify certain compounds activate certain others. Well, why is this important? Minoxidil needs an active version of this gene product to be activated. If you have a mutation that makes a less active version of this sulfotransferase You’re not going to activate minoxidil. And so you may need another medication or you may need higher doses.
Dr. Richard Harris 29:07
IGF-1. IGF-1 is a down signal for growth hormone is a major regulator of cell growth by regulating cell growth cycles. And it’s an important signal for anagen phase. IGF-1 levels are low in areas with hair loss, we look at a gene to see what’s going on with your IGF-1 levels. And there are things that we can recommend like higher protein intake or zinc or magnesium or selenium, blueberry, cinnamon, exercise to improve your IGF one levels, which if you are susceptible based upon your genetics could be a major cause of your hair loss inflammation. This is mainly concerned with alopecia areata, the autoimmune what we’re looking at is the receptor for something called glucocorticoid, glucocorticoid alpha. Glucocorticoids are basically the name for our own endogenous system. steroids, like cortisol. And these things regulate inflammation, cell growth and development. Well, we look at it our test, as we look at to see is your glucocorticoid receptor able to bind the right treatment? Because if it isn’t, if the treatment isn’t going to bind to that, then you may need higher doses or higher potency, or we may need to switch to a different agent. So this is another pharmacogenetics thing, that we can look at your genes and say, which agent Are you going to best respond to,if I put you on this? Are you going to respond to it.
Dr. Richard Harris 30:35
We also look at the ACE gene. This stands for angiotensin-converting enzyme, and this is a major regulation of blood flow, as converts angiotensin one to angiotensin two, angiotensin one actually has some anti-inflammatory increased blood flow effects. Angiotensin two has vasoconstriction constricts blood flow and the two need to be in equilibrium. Well, if your ACE enzyme is more active, you’re going to get more angiotensin two restricted blood flow. That’s not good for anagen phase because anagen
phase one of the major regulators is what we call VEGF, vascular endothelial growth factor. And angiotensin two decreases VEGF. VEGF is necessary to increase and grow blood vessels, you’re going to decrease blood flow, you decrease blood flow, you decrease nutrients, you cause cell cycle arrest hormones, we’re gonna look at a couple things related to hormones, we’re gonna look at steroid five alpha-reductase, one and two. This is the gene for the enzyme that makes the conversion of testosterone to DHT. We talked about earlier what DHT does to the hair growth cycle. Finasteride works by inhibiting type one five alpha-reductase. And dutasteride works by inhibiting type one in two. We can look at if you have a particular gene profile. will you respond to finasteride because if you have a certain profile, you’re not going to respond. But in general, we don’t use finasteride anyway, we use dutasteride topically because it’s three times more potent than finasteride at the type two and 100 times more potent at the type one, it’s more effective than because it’s so effective.
Dr. Richard Harris 32:29
We can use it topically and not get systemic side effects. The systemic effect here is if I prevent the conversion of testosterone to DHT, you’re going to feel like you have low tea. Because DHT is five times more active in the body than testosterone. This is why a lot of men stop this therapy. They’re like yeah, my hair grew back but I had ED. That’s not a trade off anyone wants to take. Well, why not use a topical therapy that works on your hair and doesn’t give you ED? We also look at a Cytochrome P450 19 or CYP-19. This codes for an enzyme called aromatase, aromatase converts testosterone into estrogen. If this is less active, that means you have more testosterone, the more testosterone the more gets converted to DHT and that’s going to be a problem for your hair. In this case, we can use melatonin. Topical melatonin inhibits the aromatase activity. It also function as an antioxidant and decreases the activity of the androgen receptor. locally in the hair. Collagen, we look at a collagen one a one gene, this is a gene for type one collagen, it’s a building block of bones, joints and cartilage. Collagen is a component of hair. It shares similar protein structure to keratin, like proline. And if you have a certain gene profile, you are deficient in making this type one collagen. And supplementing collagen could actually improve your hair.
Dr. Richard Harris 34:01
And then we look at two vitamins. And the first is looking at the CRABP2 gene. This is a cellular retinoic acid binding protein to this gene encodes for the protein that brings vitamin A into the cells. Vitamin A stimulates hair follicle maturation production of stem cells. And so this is something if we see a problem here it means that there’s a problem moving vitamin A into the cells. And we need to supplement vitamin A and then we look at biotin there is a gene called BTD. This is the gene for an enzyme called biotinidase. And this enzyme is responsible for recycling and replenishing biotech. And so even though biotin deficiencies are rare. If you have a problem with this gene, it means that your biotin is not as active and available as someone who doesn’t have it and therefore supplementing biotin can help Help with maintaining normal hair.
Dr. Richard Harris 35:03
Okay, thank you for listening to the strive for great health podcast with your host Dr. Richard Harris. Hope this was informative. If you want to learn more about Nimbus, you can go to www.nimbusmenscare.com or click the link in the profile. The hair loss product is available for women, we just don’t have the women’s website available yet. At the time of making this by the time you see this video or listen to this podcast, it might be available. But still, you can go to www.nimbusmenscare.com to find out all you need to about the Nimbus Hair Loss Solution. Currently, we’re only available in Texas, but we’re looking to expand soon. Thank you guys for listening to strive for great health podcast. I’ll see when I see you. Have a blessed day.
Dr. Richard Harris 35:45
Thank you for listening to strive for great health podcast with your host Dr. Richard Harris. It’s our mission and goal at the podcast to impact as many lives as possible to empower individuals to take control of their health and live a life full of joy and purpose. You may help us achieve this mission by leaving a five star rating and review on your preferred podcast platform. And by sharing this podcast with anyone you think it may help. You can also support the podcast by making a donation to your favorite charity. If you do so and send us an email. We’ll give you a shout out on the podcast because here’s the strive for great health podcasts. We’re all about charitable giving and making the world a better place. Thank you for listening and God bless.